Generating value is central to the mission of companies. Sustainability offers opportunities to create or to destroy value. That's why Ecos Corporation puts value creation at the centre of its approach to operationalising sustainability. If sustainability is not about creating value, it is peripheral.

We have assembled a team that understands shareholder value, value creation, and corporate sustainability. We think about it and apply it from the varied perspectives of investors, corporate leaders, governments and civil society. Our team is experienced with the modern tools for analysing and measuring value as well as the change management techniques for aligning businesses around value creation. And most importantly, our team has worked closely with the handful of companies that have taken on the challenge of building shareholder value through sustainability strategies.

Companies considering or pursuing sustainability strategies typically have several key questions about creating value:

1. What are "sustainable growth" and "sustainable value"?
2. What's the business case for corporate sustainability?
3. How might our company create value through sustainability?
4. How do we make good decisions that really create value through sustainability?
5. How should our company articulate the value we're creating to investors?

These can be paralysing questions, but you can provide clear and convincingly answers with the right preparation. Let's take each of the key questions that companies typically have around value and sustainability in turn.

Many people from a variety of walks of life find the notions of sustainability and business success to be oxymoronic. After all, we have over a hundred years of industrial history that demonstrates that growth is usually anything but socially and environmentally sustainable.

But history is not destiny. A group of companies are beginning to demonstrate that adding social and environmental value can be a source of shareholder value and business growth. One key foundation to this process is to understand the fundamental ideas of "sustainable growth" and "sustainable value" in terms that are indigenous to the company. The profound idea of creating societal value and shareholder value at the same time is easiest to accept and internalise when it is rooted in the experience of the company.

It's very easy for companies contemplating or beginning the journey towards greater sustainability to get stuck on building a value case before they ever even get started. The language sounds like,

"We would do more on sustainability, but our investors won't let us." or "No one's going to make big commitments without a clear business case."

Many people approach the value case for sustainability as the Holy Grail that will cause the scales to fall from the eyes of disbelievers. Others portray the value case as being about a compilation of academic studies demonstrating the statistical relationship between financial performance and financial value.

Neither approach has a good track record of success. Ecos Corporation helps companies break out of the trap by taking the company leadership through two distinct steps:

First, Ecos Corporation works with companies to build the "value case" generally, for their industry, and for their particular company that:

• Sustainability is worth paying attention to,
• Sustainability represents an opportunity to improve financial performance if done right, or increase financial risk if done poorly or ignored, and
• It's worthwhile investing in developing specific sustainability initiatives and strategies for more detailed analysis.

Second, Ecos Corporation helps companies develop and analyse the business case for specific strategic sustainability initiatives that can estimate the financial value of the initiatives. Whether or not an activity or effort is creating value is the subject of analysis, not guess work.

This is the central focus of Ecos Corporation's practice. We believe that the creation of value through sustainability strategies is a superior technique for driving change through a company and focusing toward sustainable growth.

Ecos Corporation has successfully used a variety of techniques to help companies build shareholder value through sustainability. Key among these is using strategic stakeholder engagement to identify opportunities that can deliver uncommon value to both stakeholders and shareholders. (See our piece on …)

But we are not recreating the wheel in this exercise - the same metrics of corporate performance and return are applied - but with a focus on creating value for both the shareholder and the society.

Most companies have approached sustainability without reference to the specific ways a given initiative can create value. Many think of it as "doing good" rather than as doing good business. This means that they have no experience estimating the value created by a potential strategy and tracking the creation of value actually created by implementing the initiative. In fact, most conventional analytical techniques systematically underestimate the financial value of sustainability initiatives.

The solution involves using the right techniques for estimating and tracking the value created by specific strategies. This creates the opportunity to identify and build on approaches that are creating value and dump those that have no value creation potential or are failing to create value. Companies need to build inter-disciplinary teams from across the company to move the responsibility beyond a "sustainability core group" and involve the creativity and intelligence of the whole organization in building sustainable value.

A logical extension of the argument that "our investors won't, let us pursue sustainability" is to "sell Wall Street" on the value creating potential of sustainability efforts. Companies should resist "selling the value" until they have created the value. Once a company can demonstrate how it is creating value through sustainability, communicating that message to investors is at least possible. To do it well, however, requires:

• Targeting the right investors.
• Crafting the message to fit cleanly with the overall corporate strategy.
• Creating realistic performance expectations about how much value and by when, and
• Tracking progress towards those goals.

And ultimately, if a company commits itself to creating value for society and its shareholders and does so successfully, its employees, investors and customers will all be rewarded.